Despite forest of fans, 'Gump' grates on some

August 01, 1994|By Sarah Lyall | Sarah Lyall,New York Times News Service

"Forrest Gump" may be the biggest hit of the year, the movie that earns a second Oscar for Tom Hanks, the one that makes audiences laugh and makes them cry, the one that proves you don't need sex and violence to succeed in Hollywood.

"Forrest Gump" may be all these things. But Jack Delaney, 48, who saw it in Manhattan last week, really doesn't buy it.

His analysis? It wasn't meaningful at all. "It was about a simpleton who goes through life, and everything works out his way," Mr. Delaney said.

Since its release this month, "Forrest Gump" has earned more than $100 million at the box office and become the surprise of the summer movie season.

Somehow it has also been elevated to an instant metaphor for the American spirit, spurring debates on TV, on editorial pages, over computer on-line services and among friends about what its popularity truly means.

It has also kicked up sales of the sleepy 1986 novel on which it TC was based and propelled a soundtrack album up the charts.

The movie, about a good-hearted, dim-witted man with a two-digit IQ who wanders through much of late-20th-century history -- desegregation, Elvis, Vietnam, the moon landing, Watergate, AIDS -- and finally becomes a rich, successful hero (and father) by chance, is striking a deep chord with many audiences, who say they are truly inspired by Forrest's simplicity, his guilelessness, his goodness.

But many critics don't see the film that way at all. To them it says dumb people prevail because they're dumb. "Is there a message here?" wrote Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe. "If he's good, is it because he doesn't have the brains to be bad or bitter?"

At a theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side last week, some moviegoers sniffled sentimentally, and others flung around superlatives. One man left the theater repeating one of the movie's many homespun aphorisms, "Stupid is as stupid does"; he called the movie "awesome."

Another audience member, Vera Kaplan, said it had been her second viewing. "It's about everybody's life and how to live it," she said. "It deepened the experience I was trying to achieve when I was practicing Zen actively."

But in every audience so taken with "Forrest Gump" that its members rise up for a standing ovation are a few vehement dissenters.

They hate the way Tom Hanks' voice rises every time he says, "Hi, my name is Forrest Gump." They hate the white feather that wafts portentously through the air, a symbol, no doubt, of something deeply symbolic. They hate the way the history seems to just meander by, and the way the movie allows somebody who essentially does nothing to prevail.

"Forrest Gump" may well be turning into the movie equivalent of "The Bridges of Madison County," Robert James Waller's 1992 feel-good romantic novel, which enjoyed incredible word-of-mouth success until a small but biting backlash began rolling around like tumbleweed.

For such people, the simple messages of "Bridges" first seemed sweet and then dangerously retrograde; "Forrest Gump" is having a similar effect. To some critics, the movie is profoundly anti-intellectual, a celebration of passivity and a rejection of thoughtful analysis.

"I think we need to ask if our society really is one that esteems education and hard work," wrote Susan Hunt in an editorial in The Phoenix Gazette in which she acknowledged that her views on the movie might seem "unpatriotic," given its popularity. "More importantly, who in our society benefits from the glorification of ignorance and inactivity?"

While Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, said that the movie was so "insistently heartwarming that it chilled me to the marrow," much of the debate on the Internet, where "Forrest Gump" is being debated more than any other current film, has sought to plumb the movie's meanings.

Does the white feather symbolize the unbearable lightness of being? Forrest Gump's impaired intellect? The randomness of experience? And why does he suddenly decide to spend three years jogging across the country? "That," said Ed Cho, 19, who saw the movie last week, "was a little weird."

For all the analysis, some people have concluded that the movie is just a gossamer entertainment, light as the feather itself, that shouldn't be studied to death as if it were "The Seventh Seal."

Even Harvey Karten, a 56-year-old high school teacher in Brooklyn who thought "Forrest Gump" was fine ("It's a lot better than 'The Client,' " is what he actually said), confessed to feeling perplexed at all the debate over its wider significance.

"It's not deep -- it's lighthearted and amusing," he said. "The commercial public goes for this stuff, and everybody I know says he likes it." They like it so much, he said, that some have returned to see it three times. "I don't see why," he said, "they wouldn't just go ahead and see something else."